The market for rain

The clay lid squeaked when Dima lifted it, and the apprentice winced as if she had caught him by the ear.

“That one costs two coppers less,” he said.

“Because it squeaks?”

“Because it’s drizzle. Last week’s drizzle.”

Dima set the lid back on the navy jar. Beneath the market awning, wet canvas gave off its close, woolly smell. Jars stood in rows on the tables, each tagged with its measure and the place where its rain had last fallen. The better stalls wrote those details twice, once on the tag and once in the sales book.

The apprentice had written them once. Dima looked at his narrow, hopeful face, then at the jar. Its paper tag read HARE FIELD, DRIZZLE, FORTY PAILS.

Forty pails would wet her eastern pear rows. The fruit there had begun to fill, and the ground had gone pale between the trees. Etta, whose smaller orchard lay below hers, had first turn at their shared water gate that evening. Dima could wait until morning or buy rain now.

“Last week doesn’t trouble me,” she said. “Last place does.”

“Hare Field. It says so.”

“Paper says whatever a hand writes on it.”

He straightened the tag with one finger. “You can ask Master Sen.”

“Is Master Sen here?”

“He’s fetching the market scales.”

Dima considered waiting. She had been a weather merchant long enough to know how a stall should keep its stock, and resented having to do the seller’s work again for the price of a jar. She noticed the fresh cord around its neck. She noticed that the tag’s corner had been cut unevenly. Neither proved anything. The other jars were dearer, and two more trees at the end of the row had begun to shed their smallest fruit.

She paid. The apprentice tucked the coins away too quickly and wrote her name in the book.

Rain kept its last landing place. It could travel a hundred miles shut inside clay and still bring the smell of a hillside, the dust of a roof, or the grit of a road. A jar marked forty pails gave forty pails, however fiercely it came down. Dima knew both rules. She carried the jar home under a folded canvas so the sun would not warm the lid loose.

---

In the orchard, she set four painted stakes around the eastern rows and placed the jar on a stump. The lid gave its little squeal. Above the trees, a cloud gathered into the shape allowed by the stakes.

“Steady,” Dima told it.

The first drops flattened the dust along the nearest pear leaf. Then rain hammered through the branches.

Drizzle, she thought, stepping under the canvas she had hung beside the shed. This was no drizzle. Pears thudded into the grass. The cloud spent itself before she could count to a hundred, exactly forty pails delivered in a hard, short shower.

Dima went to the first tree. A pear lay against a root, its skin bruised brown where it had struck. She turned it over and smelled salt.

On the leaf above it, a white crust had begun to form along the veins.

She rubbed the leaf between her fingers. Grit stayed on her skin. The rain had last fallen at White Quay, where merchants spread salt beside the harbor. She had seen jars filled there. They were cheap, useful for washing stone, and kept far from orchards.

The navy jar sat empty on the stump. Dima imagined setting it on Sen’s table hard enough to break the legs. She imagined the apprentice trying to explain himself while every buyer in the market listened.

She gathered the fallen pears into her apron instead. By the third tree the apron was too heavy, and one of the fruit slipped out and struck another.

Etta called from the wall between their plots. “Was that your rain?”

Dima looked down at the pears. Etta could see the broken fruit from where she stood, but not the white on the leaves.

“A rougher jar than I paid for,” Dima said.

“Want a hand with the fallers?”

“I have it.”

Etta rested an arm on the wall. She was carrying a coil of rope for the water gate. “I’ll take my turn tonight. Yours starts at first light.”

“I know the hours.”

“Then I’ll stop saying them when you stop borrowing mine.”

Etta went on down the path. Dima waited until the rope disappeared around the bend, then carried the pears to the shed.

Years before she kept an orchard, Dima had broken a jar of pasture rain while unloading a cart. Her employer had already sold it. She had tied its tag to a jar filled beside an ash yard and entered the sale in the book as if nothing had happened. A gardener spent two days rinsing gray grit from his young lettuce. Dima heard him complain at the stall the next market day. She let her employer blame the catch cloth.

She remembered the gardener’s name only when she smelled wet ash. She remembered his voice whenever she handled a tag.

By late afternoon, white flecks showed on leaves throughout the eastern rows. Dima fetched buckets from her well. Carrying them between the trees gave her something to do with her anger, but each bucket reached only a little ground. The well rope scraped her palm. Salt remained after the water sank away.

The shared channel ran along the top of her orchard, with a gate into her rows. Water leaving them met the channel again before it reached Etta’s plot. There was an old barrier at the lower opening. If Dima kept it shut, she could bring in water without sending any onward.

She went to look at the barrier. One board sat crooked in its stone groove.

Dima could have walked down to Etta’s house then. She pictured Etta coming up with a lantern, seeing the leaves, hearing where the rain had come from. By morning every stallholder would know that the orchard keeper who used to sell weather had bought a jar without waiting for its seller to be found.

She pushed the board farther into its groove. It held.

At dusk she took the empty jar into the shed and shut the door on it.

---

Dima lay awake long after Etta’s evening water turn ended. She waited for the first pale strip above the hills before going out. The orchard path was still dark enough that she found it by its ruts. She had no wish to steal more than her allotted hours. She wanted the channel ready at the first minute of them, and she wanted to be done before Etta came uphill again.

At the gate she heard water moving beyond the boards. She opened it, and the first clear rush entered her rows. The smell rising from the ground was wrong. Even in the dark, the rain from White Quay had left something of itself there.

For a while Dima followed the water with her lantern, moving a fallen branch out of its way. Then she heard a second trickle below her. The crooked board at the lower opening was leaking. Water from her orchard ran through it into the channel, a narrow stream that would reach Etta’s plot next.

Dima put down the lantern and shoved at the board. It stayed crooked. Mud pushed cold through her fingers as she pressed at the gap.

“Dima.”

Etta stood on the other side of the channel. She had come to check her gate before the channel filled again, and held her own lantern low over the water.

“What’s coming through there?” she asked.

Dima kept one hand against the board. She could see pale grains collecting at the edge of the leak.

“Shut your plot gate,” she said.

Etta did not move. “What’s in it?”

“Salt. The jar I bought was from White Quay. I thought I could keep this water out of your channel.”

For a moment Etta looked only at the trickle. Then she set down her lantern and ran downstream. Dima heard the scrape of Etta’s gate closing. She shut off the water entering her own rows, and the pressure against the crooked board eased.

Etta came back breathing hard. “I found it before it reached the beds.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure where I found it. I’ll look at the beds when it’s light.”

Dima lifted her hand from the board. The trickle thinned, then stopped. It had already carried salt into the shared channel.

“You could have told me this afternoon,” Etta said.

“I didn’t want you to see I’d bought White Quay rain. I thought I could rinse it out before you came uphill.”

“Sen can pay me for a new gate board, then. I had to close mine because you opened yours.”

Dima picked up both lanterns. Etta took hers without another word, and they walked the length of the channel together. Wherever the water had slowed, they stopped and looked for pale grit. At Etta’s gate, a few grains caught the light against the wet wood. Etta rubbed them off with her thumb.

They found no standing water inside her plot. She left the gate shut anyway.

The merchants camped beside the market square until Monday. At dawn Dima and Etta loaded the empty navy jar onto Dima’s cart and went to find them.

---

Master Sen was rolling his awning when they arrived. The apprentice held the canvas clear of a table stacked with clean jars. Seeing Dima, he let the awning sag onto them.

Dima set the navy jar on the table. Its lid squeaked.

“Tell him what you put in it,” she said.

The apprentice looked at the tag, still tied around the neck. “Hare Field.”

“Try what was inside.”

Sen left the awning hanging. The apprentice’s hand went to the pocket where he kept his pencil.

“I broke the last Hare Field jar unloading,” he said. “It was paid for in advance. I thought I could replace it before Master Sen counted.”

“So you labeled another one,” Dima said.

“A White Quay jar. I meant to sell it where the water wouldn’t matter.”

“You sold it to me for pears.”

“I know.”

Sen took the tag between two fingers. “You told me the Hare Field jar went to the baker.”

The apprentice nodded.

Dima had brought a list of what she wanted Sen to pay for. She had counted fallen pears by lantern light and guessed at the rest. Now she saw Sen glance from her list to the young man. She recognized the pause before a merchant decided whose fault could be put on paper.

Etta put a short, crooked board on the table beside the jar.

“This came out of our lower gate,” she said. “It leaked water from Dima’s rows into our channel. Mine stayed shut last night and it’ll stay shut until we clean the channel and mend this.”

Sen examined the board. “I’ll replace it.”

“And the work?” Etta asked.

“I’ll pay men.”

“Your apprentice can come,” Dima said. “He knows which jar he sold. He can see what it did.”

The apprentice looked up. “I’ll come.”

Sen opened his mouth, but Dima laid her list flat on the table. “Your stall owes for the fruit we can count. We’ll count again when we know what stays on the trees. He owes ten days of carrying and clearing, starting today. You’ll send a cart for him. I owe Etta the water I took while her gate was shut, and I’ll work beside him.”

Etta read the list. “You also owe me warning next time something gets into that channel.”

“Yes.”

Sen found a sheet of paper and wrote down the labor, the board, and the count of fallen fruit. He asked the apprentice to sign beneath his own name. Dima watched the young man read every line first. His hands shook only when he reached the part about returning in two weeks to count the crop.

“There’s one more thing,” Dima said.

Sen looked tired already. “What?”

“When I worked a weather stall, I broke a jar and changed its tag. I hid it in the book.” She told him whose rain she had sold and what had happened to the gardener’s lettuce.

Sen did not know the gardener. He did know her old employer. He wrote that name on the back of the sheet, where he would be able to find it later.

Etta stood beside Dima as Sen finished. Her expression did not soften. When the apprentice went to hitch the cart, she handed him the broken board so he could match its size.

---

For ten days, the apprentice came to the orchard. His name was Iven. On the first morning he arrived in market shoes and spoiled them before breakfast. By the fourth, he brought boots.

The three of them cleared the channel and carried water where the little gate could not reach. When fruit fell, Iven collected it before it lay long enough to draw wasps. Dima sorted pears at the shed table, keeping sound ones in one basket and bruised ones in another. Etta checked her beds each morning before joining them. A few leaves nearest her gate showed white specks; the plants below them stayed green.

At the end of two weeks, Dima and Sen walked the eastern rows with the labor agreement and counted what was still hanging. Many pears had grown rough, and many had fallen too early. Dima sold the soundest fruit at the market and cooked what she could of the bruised pears. The eastern rows gave her less than half what she had expected. Sen paid the agreed difference on the counted loss. The money covered the hands Dima had hired for picking; it did not give her a second crop.

At the next weekly market, Dima came for rain.

Sen’s stall stood under new canvas. A ledger lay open beside a square of dark slate, and the tags on the jars carried two sets of writing: the apprentice’s and Sen’s. Iven was behind the table. There was dried mud in the seam of one thumbnail.

Dima chose a small jar from the back row. Its tag read UPPER MEADOW, LIGHT RAIN, TWELVE PAILS. She turned it until she found the same words pressed into the wax around its neck.

“Twelve,” she said.

“Twelve,” Iven answered. He drew his pencil across the entry in the ledger and gave her its matching paper slip.

Etta, who had come to buy rain for her own trees, looked at the wax and then at the slip. “Open it.”

Iven loosened the lid. It squeaked. He caught the sample in a quarter-pail measure, then tipped it onto the slate, where it spread clear and smelled faintly of meadow grass. He crossed out twelve on the tag and the matching slip and wrote eleven and three quarters. Sen watched him correct the ledger before he signed the entry.

Dima paid for the jar. Sen put her coins in a separate drawer until she and Etta had seen the first release at the orchard, as their new agreement required. Iven tied the paper slip to Dima’s cart where she could keep it dry.

Etta bought a jar from the same row. They set the two jars side by side on the cart, with folded canvas between them so their lids would not knock together on the road.